3/13/13 11:16 AM EDT

Rep. Paul Ryan says he has “three certainties in my life — death, taxes and liberal attacks from Paul Krugman.”

The Wisconsin Republican stopped by Hugh Hewitt’s radio show on Tuesday to discuss his budget, and to knock Krugman for the columnist’s frequent attacks on him. Krugman wrote in a blog post yesterday that Ryan's newest budget proposal is just like the congressman’s last one, “except that the plan has gotten even crueler.”

“Now Chairman Ryan, from Nobel economist and New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman, to Ezra Klein at the Wonkblog at the Washington Post, all the people on the left are saying hey, we’ve got this thing licked. The last thing you want to do right now is withdraw spending. We will cause, we’ll trigger the very recession that will bring about the confidence crisis that you’re worried about,” Hewitt said, according to a transcript on his website.

“Well, so I have three certainties in my life – death, taxes and liberal attacks from Paul Krugman,” Ryan replied.

“It’s something I’ve come to realize,” the House Budget Committee chair added. “Keynesians, which is what Krugman would call himself, believe in just, in the constant pumping of the prime, and just spending more money to grow the economy. They believe in this, that if you spend more money, it produces more than a dollar’s worth of economic growth for every dollar you spend. Well, obviously, that’s not true, and there have been lots of studies debunking that. But more importantly, the more you rack up these deficits, the bigger your debt gets, the more out of control it gets.”